What is the Alba Method?

 

The Alba Method is a means for identifying, inducing, and regulating genuine emotion through conscious application of patterns of breath and muscle tension organic to basic emotions. Introduced worldwide in the early 1990s as Alba Emoting, it was initially aimed at actors and acting teachers looking for alternatives to using personal memories or other indirect means to enhance emotional expression in performance. Since then, its use has expanded into other fields such as psychotherapy and human relations. The result of more than 20 years of research by experimental psychologist Susana Bloch and her colleagues, the Alba Method identifies six basic emotions – anger, joy, sadness, fear, tenderness, and eroticism – which blend to create the full range of human feeling, as well as the physiology of emotional calm (neutrality). Each state of emotion has its own unique, universal, identifiable patterns of breathing, posture, and facial expression. Learning to physically reproduce the patterns allows the individual to recognize emotional responses, identify and gently penetrate habituated tensions and emotional blocks, and, as accuracy increases, ultimately to engage and leave an emotional state at will.

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